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Moving from Disqus to Schnack

blog.webkid.io

81–90 of 120 posts

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#81
post #69

It is an interesting comment on the state of commenting. Gardening the comments section is a lot of work and not something people want to spend their time on (the Blekko blog would get hundreds of spam comment attempts every day!). That makes me wonder if there is also an opportunity for a 'meta comment' section which pulls comments from web sites like HN, Reddit, or Slashdot and puts them below the blog / article th…

So HN pays dang to curate, then ChucksCommentScraper.io appropriates that content for free?

That's a fair point. What I was thinking about was avoiding the possibly apocryphal notion that stories that included a link to HN for comments were penalized. It maybe that only stories that link to the 'upvote' link are penalized.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#82
post #76

I actually like hacknews' comment style the most, neat and simple, good enough for talks, no images and no videos etc too. wish there are some light-weight forum code that is nodejs based, nodebb is a little heavy, and I don't really enjoy discourse's UI.

I wonder if one of the keys to HN's success, apart from great moderation, is that poster's identities are very subdued.

I feel it encourages responding to the post, rather than the person making it.

By contrast discourse stuffs a big image of the poster and their username in your face, as does Reddit.

I find the first impression on those platforms is that I'm talking to someone with Donald Trump's head as an Avatar and a provocative username. Which does not naturally lead to considered response.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#83
post #74
post #49

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary…

>Is there a good reason why online discourse is still fragmented Good reason? I don't know, probably only because no single platform has become ubiquitous. Of course, as soon as that happens we'll be seeing a lot of comments here about how it's terrible that online discourse is centralized and that people should abstain from using . In thinking some more, I prefer to spend my time here as opposed to reddit because th…

It’s because no one wants to do the job of moderation.

Reddit uses moderators to police their subreddits basically for free . All of the founders have been admins which police the moderators or do the things that mods can’t do.

It’s not like this phenomena is new. Digg and Slashdot had similar problems . Newsgroups even before that with eternal September. Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter use paid moderators (but have the pockets to do so) and they still are deluged with issues. Microsoft even has some class action lawsuit over people having PTSD after performing image moderation. 4Chan has had similar problems also.

We haven’t gotten even to advertisements that have conflict of interest. Even worse though is that if you have groups that your site allows in and your advertisers see it they will flee you really fast. Also, the fact that those same brands can just buy social network PR services for a fraction of the cost and all of the upside. Even better that they will be platform agnostic which means when reddit gets replaced they will still be there.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#84
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> supporting millions of users and tens of millions of comments That seems like an unusually low number of comments per user, best case 99:1.

Most comments on any random blog would be the lone comment left by that particular user, right? Don't these things follow some kind of power law?

Right, but users are commenters, ie doesn’t include readers.

~ 1:99 seems to suggest the platform is pretty new and/or dominated by low participation communities. Is Mozilla Coral Project federated? Can the same person be easily counted multiple times (user)?

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#85
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing's stopping you from running a self-hosted solution on a different domain.

Sure, but then you have to run a self hosted solution on another domain. It's far easier if someone else is willing to do it for you at a low cost (or even free).

Seems like this would easily run on the free tier of Heroku for a blog with modest traffic.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#87
post #58
post #49

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary…

Discourse is fragmented because there are dozens of different communities that like to talk amongst themselves. I think that's fine. I don't always want to be talking on an internet megaphone and I definitely don't want to be listening to one all the time.

Yes, fragmentation is a feature. Otherwise you are re-inventing Facebook, and we aren’t even sure we want the one of those we have.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#88
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most comments on any random blog would be the lone comment left by that particular user, right? Don't these things follow some kind of power law?

Right, but users are commenters, ie doesn’t include readers. ~ 1:99 seems to suggest the platform is pretty new and/or dominated by low participation communities. Is Mozilla Coral Project federated? Can the same person be easily counted multiple times (user)?

The numbers were roughly based on aggregated values across all our current partner companies working with us. Most of these orgs have not imported their historical data either, however they all have added support for integrating their own custom auth services into Talk, as that whole layer is pluggable, hence you might get most of the users auto-added with low participation.

The ease of use of the moderation system as well might mean that more bad comments are pushed out of the system, making it full of more higher quality discussions.

One of the pillars of Coral is to provide lots of research to assist orgs develop community strategies[0], I'd suggest taking a look if you're interested!

[0]: http://guides.coralproject.net/

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#89
post #70
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't know Medium supported a canonical url to point somewhere else. Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately, I think a comment system is one of the things Medium does poorly (I actually like Medium a lot in terms of other aspects, unlike most of HN it seems). They seemed to try to re-use their regular post system too much for commenting and each comment is like its own post, making a threaded discussion almost…

Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Medium. The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre. Also, comments have become increasingly hidden behind suggested articles and require a click to load. But I like that you can highlight a word or sentence and comment on that. The clapping thing is kind of interesting because you can give more "internet points" to better articles. The one thing that Medium…

>The fact that every comment is another "article" is bizarre.

And yet right here on Hacker News, submissions and replies are both just "items" and the UX is fantastic. It's not so much about the way they are represented as the way they are presented.

Re: Moving from Disqus to Schnack

#90
post #49

A general observation about online comments: when I read an article online and want to know what other people are saying about it, I have no easy & simple way to do so. If your blog has a comments section, that's great, but what about all the other platforms that people discuss things on? (Twitter and Reddit [and of course HN!] come to mind.) I would love to see a comments system that provided insight into commentary…

I just add links to HN/reddit threads at the end of my posts. Simple and elegant solution.
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